Strangers in Society, Strangers in Love
Sociological meanderings toward collective well-being.
I’ve been thinking a lot about relationships. In particular, my thoughts keep circling back to our narrow cultural framework for making sense of love and intimacy.
I was driving home from work recently, and my brain detected sudden movement. I automatically looked into my rearview mirror and had just a split second to process the driver coming up fast–and I mean at least, if not more than 90 mph fast–on my tail before my car was struck. I was in the left lane of a major expressway in the suburbs of the 3rd largest city in the United States. It was late afternoon, though not yet serious rush-hour traffic. My car spun to the right, across three lanes of traffic, smashed head-on into the guard rail, bounced off the guard rail, and spun another 180 degrees (so that the rear of the car was now facing the guard rail that the front had just crashed into). At this point, my car had stopped–all airbags deployed–and was blocking all three lanes of the expressway. Miraculously, no other cars crashed into me through all this.
A stranger driving extremely fast hit me, hit my car. A different stranger pulled over, running from his now parked car to mine, and pulled the airbag at the window of the driver-side door just enough so that he could check on me. He stayed with me until the emergency vehicle crew arrived. My car automatically called 911, so while this kind stranger was with me, I was also on the phone with another stranger, the one who had called 911. Both of these folks asked me if I could wiggle my fingers and toes. I could! Eventually, a state trooper arrived, and the kind stranger left the scene to return to his regularly scheduled life. Still, more strangers helped and supported me, from the EMT crew to the hospital staff, to the folks at the insurance companies, the rental car store, and the car dealership where I bought my new car, as my car had been declared a total loss.
My wife, Tori, was at my side (at first electronically and then face-to-face) throughout all of this. My Apple Watch (using technology strangers developed) had sent her a text message since she was listed as my “in case of emergency” contact, so she knew immediately I was in an accident as well as the exact location. Because the car itself, through Starlink, had called emergency services, I could be on my cell phone with Tori while the kind stranger–his name was Eric–kept me company.
When I think of love and intimacy, of course, I think of Tori. She’s my person.
But I can’t help but wonder: how would we act if we expanded our framework of love and intimacy to include strangers, to include people we will never meet or people we will only briefly encounter? Was it not an act of love that caused Eric, the kind stranger, to stop his car when he could have done what most people did and driven along the shoulder, past the accident, and on with his life? Was it not a moment of intimacy that we shared, given that he was the first person to witness, in person, my physical and emotional vulnerability at that moment?
Another moment of very real vulnerability and, admittedly, self-consciousness, was when the EMT workers got me out of my car and transferred me to a stretcher and then into the ambulance. I was acutely aware of how gentle they were being while also ever so cognizant that all the other drivers on the road were watching me. I remember thinking, “Please, let there be no one I know watching me right now.” It just felt like too much that all of these people were bearing witness to this moment of mine. But there they were, all of these people, these strangers’ lives bound up with mine.
Really deep down, the person I’m thinking about the most is the woman who hit me. She’s the same age as me; I know this from the accident report. Maybe her life is nothing like mine, or maybe it’s eerily similar. I’ll never know because I will never meet her. The officer at the scene told me when her court date would be in case I wanted to attend. That date happens to be this very day–today–that I am sitting here writing these words. But I will not go. I wonder what she was doing, driving so fast: was she distractedly talking on the phone or reading text messages? Was she on the way to meet a family member at the hospital? Was her child sick at daycare and in need of pick-up? Was she sober? Was she late for work? Is she okay? I will not get answers to these questions.
What I do know is that she is a part of me now. She is with me most intimately when I drive to and from work on that same expressway, my body tight, tense, and buzzing with anxiety and terror. There is a short distance between the moment she hit me and today, so I’m sure her presence and this grip of anxiety will lessen with time. But the fact of the matter is we are in a relationship, and to me, it feels intimate, in part because it is so deeply embodied.
I was in a relationship with her before she hit me. Who knows how long we were sharing the road before she came up behind me, slamming into the trunk of my car? We are always in a relationship with other drivers, most of whom are strangers that we will never meet, and I would argue that this relationship is always intimate; the vulnerability of our bodies is always tied up with the actions of all the other people driving at the same time as us.
What would happen if we saw these strangers on the road as loved ones? Would we approach the practice with more care and consideration?
Or, think about food. The food I put in my body is also a very intimate act. It is life-giving. One person’s hands touched the banana I ate for breakfast–they pulled it (in a bunch) off the tree on a plantation in Guatemala–and now it’s in my body. And yet, agricultural laborers are one of the most exploited groups of workers across the globe. Strangers I will never meet make it possible for me to feed myself. Why don’t we pay them a livable wage, given that feeding someone is considered an act of love? This is such an intimate relationship! Many of the strangers driving on the road alongside me are driving trucks of food from farms and ports and delivering this food to grocery stores. The woman who hit me could work for or at one of those grocery stores.
The relationships that exist among strangers are organized through an invisible thread. This is what we call society. And thus, to orient toward each other in ways that respect this intimacy would require social policies to be organized through the lens of love. In other words, it cannot only be that we, as individuals, start to love one another better or more (though we should) because our personal actions only meet a very small percentage of the people in the world, despite our intimate connections. Thus, love must be organized at the macro level as well.
Both care and love — two things that we most often think of as feelings — are also actions, and they are vital links to our capacity to organize. They, themselves, are also organized. That is, we need care and love — in both feeling and action — to organize our society towards greater well-being; also, we can organize society in ways that increase our capacities for care and love.
bell hooks (1994) wrote:
Many of us have been physically and financially hurting these past few years, still reeling from the shut-down stage of the pandemic. So many loved ones were lost, so many jobs were reorganized, and so much changed in a very short period of time. The hard part, as Emile Durkheim, C. Wright Mills, and Ellen Scott wrote about, is that to think sociologically, we have to think beyond what is hurting us and also think about how we can alleviate what hurts others. Our personal troubles are connected to public issues, which also means that we are not alone in our hurt (Mills).
What we need now, more than ever, is solidarity.
Our path forward requires collective agreement and action. Mills (1959) wrote that the accumulation of our daily actions becomes “public issues” and, ultimately, history. This is why when I drive, I do so with care: I drive for you, for the collective you, for the “public issue” of the transportation system, particularly of automobile accidents being the 8th leading cause of death globally. When I respect speed limits and stay off my phone while driving, I am contributing to the history of this moment, this society, and this species. When I opt to walk or bike rather than drive, I am contributing to the disinvestment in fossil fuels. I want all of the people who are alive to stay that way: for everyone who is hungry to eat; for everyone who is sick to heal; for those who are driving to work right now to get there safely; for those who are grieving to have ample space to grieve. So I wear a seat belt, follow the rules of the road, put my phone away, and cultivate my solidarity — my love and care — for the collective so we can all move forward together.
Traffic rules, laws, and the symbols that accompany them (yellow lines, red lights) are examples of socially organizing love and care. So are policies that lead to building more bike lanes or policies that ban pesticides being sprayed by air over farm workers’ homes. These policies recognize the realities of our intertwined existence, as well as the dangers present, and choose collective well-being over personal gain.
If we move beyond the individual, that’s where we find Sociology and also love. As hooks wrote,
Put another way, “there’s a lot of work love has to do in the world” (Solnit), and we can organize society to cultivate that love. I think, in particular, we need to expand our notion of what love is and who is enveloped by that love. Through social organization, love can reach both inside and beyond our families; love can reach us all.
Note: This piece is adapted from a previously posted essay about the pandemic.
